Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ilia Delio
Read between
December 2 - December 18, 2023
He considered matter and consciousness not as “two substances” or “two different modes of existence, but as two aspects of the same cosmic stuff.”27 Mind and matter form the reality of the whole.
For Teilhard, matter is the incarnating presence of divinity; God is present in matter and not merely to matter. Both Jung and Teilhard rejected the Thomistic view of divine creation and participation. God and matter, they said, form a relational whole.
Jung thought that true religion was yet to be born. In his view, Christianity established the right direction for growth in consciousness, but Christianity was not meant to be a new religion, much less an institution.
“Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is opposed. Third, it is regarded as self-evident.”1
energy is the stuff of the universe. Matter is energy moving slowly enough to be seen.
Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it.
What scientists are realizing today (although this is still controversial) is that the whole of life, from the Big Bang onwards, is the emergence of mind or consciousness.
The Eastern sages have known that consciousness is our fundamental reality, but Western science (and religion) has never accepted consciousness as integral to matter.
Bohm suggested that an intense heightening of individuals who have shaken off the “pollution of the ages” (worldviews that propagate ignorance), who come into close and trusting relationship with one another, can begin to generate the immense power needed to ignite the whole consciousness of the world.
How we think is how we act and how we act shapes what we become.
For Teilhard, the soul is not other than the body, spirit is not other than matter, and the human person belongs to the animal kingdom.
In short, Teilhard discovered a new and vital God, not a God dominating the world with power, but a God integral to the world’s becoming. The world had taken on new meaning, no longer the fragmented state of a static cosmos, but the organic state and vitality of a cosmogenesis, with the human as the vanguard.60
Creativity is a fascinating way to describe the energy of newness. It includes the power of the mind to imagine, the power of matter to shape and be shaped, and the freedom to explore ideas or potentials never before envisioned. Creativity is the heart of cosmic life.
Modern philosophy has interpreted the mind as a distinct center of intellectual power, disconnected from the outer universe. Quantum physics tells us otherwise: there is no outer universe without the inner universe, because there is no matter without mind.
Spirituality proposes what reality can become.
Unless religion changes and adapts to the evolving world, it cannot do what it has the capacity to do: enkindle a zest for life.
Religion is to energize the human toward greater wholeness and unity.
However, the more I read Jung and Teilhard together, the more I am convinced that the paradigm shift needed to rekindle the religious spirit and, in a particular way, the Christian spirit, requires the integration of psychology, theology, cosmology, and quantum physics as we understand these sciences within the processes of evolution.
Jung’s abiding sense of a radical immanence led him to see divinity as approaching consciousness from no other source than one’s own inner being.
He felt that Christianity had become a “dead system,” imprisoned in isolated dogmatic certitudes; religion had become a matter of the head and not of the total person.13 Teilhard similarly lamented: “Christianity no longer stimulates the need to worship for the modern mind, but rather paralyzes it.”
When the outer world and the inner world form one seamless world, the unus mundus, then we are fully alive in the All. As Teilhard wrote: “If I am to be All, I must be fused with All.”
A theology of transcendence that diverts attention away from embodied life toward supernatural life can turn into abandoning earth life for an imaginary God.
Jesus has been primarily understood not as a human being who realized his own divinity but as a god or divine being who was sent down from the sky.
Marion notes that “Christians go to church on Sunday as if entering a time warp, putting the modern scientific worldview aside for an hour or two to submit to the old mythic worldview. Then they emerge to take up once again the scientific worldview that guides their lives and professions during the week.”
Jung evokes new ideas of divinity not conceived by the early Church Fathers who wrote theology in a pre-scientific age.
What has distorted this awareness has been the attempt to process Jesus’s experience through a rigid Western interpretation of Abrahamic monotheism that sees creator and creature as separated by an unbridgeable abyss. But Jesus himself neither taught nor experienced this.
There is no mediator between mind and matter. Language has functioned as a mediator, but, in doing so it has artificially carved up the world.
The universe is not an agglomeration of particles but rather is an organism whose inter-connectedness is so intricate that no part of it, including God, can be clearly delineated from the whole.
Transcendence is no longer above or ontologically beyond us; transcendence is the openness of incomplete matter or matter in evolution toward wholeness. Transcendence is the stretching of matter into the future, the orientation of matter toward the absolute wholeness of life, toward God Omega.
If we seek religion only to govern and save ourselves, we will lose everything.
the Catholic Church turned its back on the Franciscan theologians following the rise of nominalism and modern science. By officially mandating the theology of Aquinas as the official theology of the Church in 1879, the Church closed itself off from supporting a living God-world relationship in a world of change.
God is no longer the essence of simplicity. God is complexifying oneness in evolution.
The not-yet God is the God of the future, the God who is coming to be. The drama of cosmic awakening, therefore, contributes to the very identity of God.46 God and world cannot be separated because matter, and the potential of matter to become something more, undergird existence, and the heart of existence is the infinite wellspring of love, which is the energy of life itself. Hence, transcendence does not belong to God alone but to the God-world unity in its infinite potential to become something more together
If the universe is unfinished, then God is unfinished as well.
God emerges in evolution as a New Being, the New Person, a union of divinity and materiality, signified by the Christ.
If the universe is unfinished, it is because the entangled whole—including God—is not yet finished. The universe is evolving.
To become aware of and understand the whole is to acknowledge the presence of consciousness in the universe as an intrinsic aspect of all things in space and time. The consciousness that permeates nature is the same flow of activity that each of us inherits in a unique way. In and through our minds, we are part of an undivided whole that is our home, the cosmos.
Self-organization is maintained by openness to the environment, spontaneity, and new patterns of order. We humans are part of a cosmic relational whole, nature’s interlocking wholeness of intricate systems.
The vital question for Christianity today is to decide what attitude believers will adopt towards this recognition of the value of the Whole, this “preoccupation with the Whole.” Will they open their hearts to it, or will they reject it as an evil spirit?55
The rise of the “holonomic” person, or one who lives with a consciousness of the whole, is characteristic of younger generations who are invested in the community of planetary life, concerned about such issues as shared economic resources, global warming, racial and gender equality. The world is converging through a rise in consciousness into a new complexified whole, emerging through computer technology and the global brain.
In 1967, the historian Lynn White published a controversial essay entitled “The Historic Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” in which he claimed that Christianity is the primary source of the environmental problem. Christianity, with its emphasis on human salvation and dominion over nature, he said, “made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”
White listed several factors important to Christian belief that have contributed to our environmental problems: (1) an ambivalent attitude toward creation; (2) a stance of dominion that has led to exploitation; (3) an other-worldly focus; (4) a preoccupation with sin and guilt that has led to intense preoccupation with self; and (5) an emphasis on personal salvation. He insists that Christians are responsible for the ecological crisis because they have taken God’s command to have dominion over creation as a command to dominate and subdue it (Gen 1:27–28).
A thousand million lights shining around the globe—with the divine light of love—can turn the darkness of the earth into the brilliance of heaven.
The vitality of God is the human person consciously alive.
When the religious story is read literally, its true power and meaning are lost. As a consequence, access to the depths from which the story arises is also lost.
Love transforms because love unites. Love pierces through the veil of divine mystery and enters into personal union with the ground of life. What begins in this life endures for all eternity, for God’s love is an everlasting love (Jer 31:3).
To live in this entangled mystery is the focus of God’s inexhaustible creative delight. And it should be our delight as well. However, our frenzied, scattered, information-driven world cannot comprehend the entangled God, and we continue to search without for that which is already within.
A mystic knows God not as an object outside oneself but as another “myself.” Any conceptual talk of God is not God-talk but ego-talk, a projected ideal of God.
The Father comes from no one and thus is the fountain fullness; the Son is begotten by the Father and is image and Word of the Father; the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and Son is the bond of love between them.
To say God is Trinity is to speak of a God who is involved in the life of the world in a deep and personal way. Despite the neglect of Trinitarian theology in practice, the cornerstone of Christian faith is fundamentally Trinitarian.
